After all the positive reviews I was expecting to go see a great movie, instead it is only “passable”. I’m not surprised that Alan Moore didn’t like it.

There are two parts that didn’t work, the “humanization” of V and the whole screenplay.

The screenplay was absolutely crap. I really didn’t understand why it was messed up, the original story is already prefectly cinematographic, with a perfect mood. The changes just don’t make any sense if not to manipulate the story to make it much less believable and solid. Just as an example at the very beginning, Evey originally approached the guard to offer for sex and get some money. She starts as a quite desperate character trying to survive in that world, she was hopeless and lost. In the movie the whole situation is stereotyped to the point that it loses all its strength and feels rather cheap. The guards approach Evey and menace her directly. It becomes the usual “damsel in distress” with the baddies around her, just waiting for the superhero to arrive and save her. How utterly predictable.

All the fine sophistication of the original story is lost in a second to never to be found again in the whole movie. V, one of the most fascinating characters ever created, becomes just an anarchic, politicized version of Spider-Man, or Spawn, or Batman. Or all of them stacked up together. And here starts the usually hollywood action movie. Finely crafted, sure, but nowadays feeling like an unnecessary cut and paste from every other movie.

V is humanized through the ridicule of the character. The sarcasm here looks so absolutely out of place and I felt as watching a parody of “Scary Movie”. Switch the masks and they feel exactly the same. Why there was the need to completely remove the inscrutability to transform the whole thing into another improbable love story?

The rest of the movie is acceptable but everything is so constantly bloated and pushed to the excess that the whole “message” of the movie is kind of lost. Exploited. It is just doesn’t work and makes that world feel so much distant from our own, faked. Failing to make us think and get the analogies, the symbolic value.

The original story was set in a precise moment, but Alan Moore made the mood feel somewhat “out of time”, anachronistic. Which helped to make the message feel actual and not dependent on a geographic location and precise time. The movie completely loses the mood, it “shows” too much, it is always too explicit, too defined. Too blatant.

So I didn’t like it at all. The character was ruined, the story twisted and stereotyped, the message lost credibility and power.

It is still decent. As a movie it isn’t particularly good. It isn’t directed really well, same hollywood stuff, all the movies look exactly the same, all cloned. But the power of the story is still there, somewhere, and makes the movie worthwhile at least.

It is coarse and too close to the average superhero movie. Modernized and filled with cliches. Ready to be merchandized. A great ideal made cheap, emptied and sold off. But somewhere, it can still reach the public despite all these manipulations.

Great interpretation for the actor behind V, instead. It wasn’t easy to bring on screen a character without a face, communicating just with the movement of the head and the body language. He did really a good work.